A Visit With Bush

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH had us perched on the extreme edge of our seat last Tuesday. It appeared that the leader of a divided free world was going to drop a political bombshell in response to a provocative question we asked about China, Russia and France's motives regarding Iraq.

White House press spokeswoman Claire Buchan had offered us a golden opportunity: to meet with President Bush along with eight other journalists to ask him anything that we wanted. For a journalist, even a senior one, an invite like this is as rare and as exciting as winning a state lottery for a reportable amount of income. We journalists occupied half a long, oval table in the ochre-colored Roosevelt Room, which was named by President Richard Nixon for both Teddy and Franklin. The president and members of both his White House staff and his economic team occupied the other half. Despite the formality of the setting, Bush's down-home style transformed the table into a split-rail fence, almost as if he were clad in jeans and leaning over to chat with the grizzled journalists.

The Roosevelt is arguably the most Western of the White House public areas. Frederick Remington's famous bronze sculpture of stampeding buffalo adorns one table top. There's a 19th century painting of the frontier on one of the walls. We found it the perfect backdrop for a president whose folksy Texas persona is both an irritant and an enigma to many of the pretentious Easterners who make the wheels of government squeak inside the Beltway.

Our question was this: "Our country has been accused of threatening to go to war with Iraq because of oil. And yet when we read the foreign press -- we read the People's Daily, the Chinese paper; we read Pravda -- we get the sense that the Russians and the Chinese are joined against us with the French because of their oil interests in Iraq. And we are wondering if you feel that the Russians and the Chinese have their own oil interests at heart and are trying to sabotage our war against terrorism?"

Bush, not quite ready to answer the question, leaned way back in his chair, stared up at the high ceiling and exclaimed, "Yeayah." The room erupted into laughter. He had a look on his face that said to us that he was happy that someone had asked him this question and that he would take the deepest pleasure in answering it. At least that's what we thought as we waited for our hook to set. The eight other journalists no doubt have 16 other interpretations.

Bush stared at the ceiling silently for about 30 seconds. His staffers were shooting sidelong glances at one another. Bush suddenly straightened and told us that we had made an incorrect assumption. China and Russia, he suggested, were not opposed to his position on Iraq.

He reminded us that he had gotten a 15-0 vote from the United Nation's Security Council when it voted on the original resolution concerning Iraq's weapons violations and suggested that the Council might end up strongly supporting the U.S. position again. That optimistic assessment constituted the big news of the day, suggesting to several journalists in the room that Russia and China, while publicly opposing the U.S., may be privately siding with Bush.

Bush also indicated that the breach with France wouldn't cause a long-term disruption of relations. "The question is not just energy, the question is economic interest," he said. "There are some, I suspect. But I would never second-guess Jacques Chirac when he makes his case from a moral perspective. I believe that he's sincere."

We were struck during this meeting by Bush's determination -- which has an undercurrent of religious fervor -- to make the world a better place. He identified Lincoln as his role model. "The goal of the President is to unite the country to achieve big, grand objectives," he said. At home, he wants not only to jump-start the economy with what he now calls his tax reduction plan; but he wants to remake society to be "neighbor helping neighbor."

There's more to this than anti big-government thinking. Bush let slip evidence of his evangelical Christian streak. He said that he envisioned an America that gives people the hopeful sense they can deal with their problems "particularly if they have a neighbor who loves them as they would like to be loved themselves." Doesn't the Bible quote Jesus as saying something just like that?

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